Skip to main content
Sauce

Parsley and Butter

A sauce of boiled parsley mixed with melted butter, served in a sauceboat.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and butter are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 28,563 recipes. Both carry trans-2-hexenal, which smells green, leafy. The science ↓

Parsley and Butter

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the parsley

  1. Wash the parsley thoroughly and pick the leaves off carefully.

  2. Add the salt to the boiling water and boil the parsley for about 10 minutes.

  3. Drain the parsley in a sieve, then mince it finely and bruise it to a pulp.

Make the sauce

  1. Place the minced parsley in a sauceboat and gradually mix in the melted butter.

  2. Do not add flour, as the parsley will thicken the sauce.

Serve

  1. Serve the parsley and butter in the sauceboat, not poured over the dish.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Parsley + buttertop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28,563 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Fresh parsley leaves
Provides the main herbal flavour and, once bruised to a pulp, thickens the sauce naturally.
Melted butter
Adds richness and a smooth, fatty body that carries the parsley flavour.

The step that matters

Gradually mixing in the melted butter. Adding the butter slowly, while the minced parsley is pulverised, lets the butter emulsify evenly with the parsley pulp. Pouring it in all at once can leave the sauce greasy and separated.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)Wine Sauce (for stewed fruit)186 recipesCaper SauceCaper Sauce180 recipesBrown SauceBrown Sauce141 recipesDutch SauceDutch Sauce74 recipes